


Cleanse us of our human skin

by howevernot



Category: Trust (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Complicated Relationships, Developing Relationship, Drug Use, I don't know how to tag this, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Revenge, impaired consent due to intoxication, off screen murder, on screen body disposal, one-sided Primo/Leonardo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:06:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27907939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howevernot/pseuds/howevernot
Summary: He's sitting in a bar with people who aren't his friends when he realizes that he is the only person in the room who has ever delivered a lamb. He’s the only one who knows the smell of sheep and blood, the way some lambs come out yellow with afterbirth, the way the moms lick them clean while they’re still fresh and wobbly. He’s the only one who’s dumped a stillborn in the dirt by the door and watched flies start to crawl over the half open eyes in the afternoon sun.
Relationships: Leonardo & Primo Nizzuto, Leonardo/Regina (Trust), Primo Nizzuto/Original Character(s)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 46





	Cleanse us of our human skin

**Author's Note:**

> I couldn't stop thinking about what it's like being a country gay who moves to the city for the first time and how difficult that transition can be and, as you can see, then this spiraled out of control. The document for this fic contains 10k words but this was all that I could wrangle into a story. Also full disclosure, I am not Italian and the farming details are dubious at best. This is unbeta'd. 
> 
> The title is adapted from a phrase that appears in Anne Carson's introductory essay on _Hekabe_ in _Grief Lessons._ The first scene of this is also shamelessly inspired by "At the Acme Bar & Grill" by Julia Kasdorf.
> 
> Many thanks to my dear Sage for the help with writing crime.
> 
> FOR A MORE DETAILED TRIGGER WARNING PLS REFER TO THE END NOTES.

He's sitting in a bar in Rome with people who aren't his friends when he realizes that he is the only person in the room who has ever delivered a lamb. He’s been elbow deep inside a struggling ewe, his arm covered in blood, pulling at a lamb. He’s the only one who knows the smell, the way some lambs come out yellow with afterbirth, the way the moms lick them clean while they’re still fresh and wobbly. He’s the only one who’s dumped a stillborn in the dirt by the door and watched flies start to crawl over the half open eyes in the afternoon sun.

In the bar, the man next to him, Amedeo, is laughing and leaning close. Their thighs are pressed together under the table. This man has never climbed a mountain for anything other than leisure. He’s probably never even done it for fun, either the way the kids in town run wild in the mountains in the afternoon. 

Amedeo turns to him with a dimpled smile and raises his glass. Primo brings up his own with a muttered toast. 

Primo has worked hard to shake the stink of the country. He dresses the part, he acts the part, he carefully cultivates his appearance and behavior to submerge into the city. But there are parts he can't shake. The daily rituals of the country have never quite left him. The way he still wakes abominably early sometimes, ready to pull on his boots and go out to the goats. He still thinks of the planting and harvesting schedule as the year turns over into winter. He still hates how expensive produce is in the Roman markets.

"Primo," Amedeo calls to him. Primo imagines him with his nice nails and his pristine shirts reaching under a broody hen, how he might screech louder than the hen when he inevitably got pecked. Primo smiles as he joins the conversation again.

~~~~~

He’s already sweat through his shirt when he takes the final turn that brings his hometown into view. His stomach still swoops a little when the town comes into view, tucked into the valley, climbing the mountainside. When he’s in Rome, he tells himself it’s not beautiful but still, that little swoop in his belly. He tells himself it’s vertigo.

He turns off the road into the valley, keeping to the mountain roads. He’s home for one very specific reason and that is to make a delivery to Salvatore. He winds through the landscape until he arrives at Salvatore’s door. He pops the trunk, Salvatore’s men take the bags, he hops back in the car and drives away. Salvatore wasn’t even home. 

He doesn’t drive down into the town after the exchange. He keeps to the mountain roads, pulling off on dirt roads to see what he can find. 

He stumbles on an old barn. The floor is covered in muck and the rafters are starting to rot away. The last time someone used it was probably before the war. He tries to think back over the roads he took to get here. He has to pull out the can of gas in his trunk and gas back up to make it into town.

~~~~~

He goes to Salvatore’s that night, for dinner, as is expected. Salvatore sits at the head of the table and asks Primo no questions. Alessandra asks Primo inoffensive little questions that he answers with partial fabrications. Leo asks him more pointed questions and sighs deeply when Primo doesn’t answer honestly. It would almost be fun, if Salvatore weren’t there at the other end of the table, watching them.

He stays through digestifs and espresso and cigarettes and men’s talk where he adds little but watches carefully.

When Alessandra offers the spare room, he leaves as quickly as possible, not even bothering to be polite about it.

He gets in his car but doesn’t bother starting it. Just sits there, in the damp dark smoking. He’s not alone. There’s guards at the door and he can see Alessandra by the bedroom window. No one spares him a glance. 

A knock on his window. He rolls it down, to look up at Leo, whose face is completely in shadow.

“You have somewhere to sleep tonight?”

Primo shrugs; he does in fact have a place to stay. Leo makes a frustrated little noise and Primo keeps his face impassive, though he wants to smile.

“Come to dinner tomorrow.” It’s not quite an order and Primo blows smoke towards him, nods, starts to roll up the window. 

“After dinner works too. For drinks.”

Primo just nods again and closes the window. 

He fucks off back to Rome within days.

~~~~~

Primo spends the night after he gets back from Calabria high and sleepy and a little tipsy in Amedeo’s apartment. He’d gone to Leo’s and sat with him outside, drinking. Leo had watched the swifts and told Primo that he and Regina were trying for a baby. Primo had left the next morning without telling anyone he was leaving.

Now, he’s floating comfortably in Amedeo's bed. The room is wobbling and Primo pays more attention to the way the pattern on the ceiling wiggles than to Amedeo, who’s been rambling on for the last hour. He doesn’t pay attention when Amadeo leaves the room, or to the muffled voices in the hall. Primo’s needed this, to get out of his skull and forget the way Salvatore still looks at him like an animal.

When Amedeo comes back, Primo stretches out against the bed. Normally he would give a fuck how he looks, spread out on another man’s bed. Normally he would try to angle his head just right and worry about his hair. His eyes slide away from Amedeo quickly and he’s thinking about the mountains, how nice it would be to lay out in the sun, high like this. 

Amedeo is saying something, looking at him intently and Primo isn’t tracking. He smacks Primo’s thigh and Primo tunes into whatever conversation he’s been having with himself.

“Primo? Do you want to? It’s just Leonardo is over and he doesn’t want to--” 

He narrows his eyes momentarily wondering what the fuck Leo is doing here in Rome, in this exact apartment; he has a moment of terror that he’s been found out, that Salvatore has sent Leo to come and collect him for some painful and public punishment. It’s in the middle of his panic that Amedeo climbs on top of him and kisses him. 

A different Leo, he realizes as he remembers a friend Amedeo mentioned before Primo went to Calabria.

Amedeo’s beard scratches against his face; Primo kisses back languidly, lost in the sensation of tongue on tongue. It isn’t sexy. It’s nice and warm, the sensations are interesting and a little disgusting; he’s quickly tired of it. But Amedeo isn’t pulling back and Primo is swept along into a long series of kisses. It quickly devolves into Amedeo making frustrated little noises as he fucks Primo’s mouth with his tongue.

It’s only when Amadeo starts to grind on him that the exhaustion of the high settles against him, dragging him down towards stupor. He stops kissing back entirely and lets Amedeo prod him into rolling over. He's relieved at the reprieve from kissing. With his eyes closed, and his face in the pillow he feels consumed by the bedding, the vertigo intensifies as if he’s been tossed into the sea, surrounded by warmth, roiling uncomfortably in the waves. He breathes slow through the nausea, realizing that he is too stoned; he’s too stupefied to complain as Amedeo pulls off his pants. He kisses down Primo's back and he shivers, thinks about telling Amadeo to fuck off, stop touching him. When he opens his mouth to speak he has to close it again, breathing carefully as the alcohol he’s had in the last hour threatens to come back up.

The fingers are a surprise and Primo moans into the bed. He feels pinned to the bed, between the high, the spinning, the two fingers unexpected in his ass, Amedeo straddling his thighs. Amedeo is still talking, a stream of muttered insults, _dirty, disgusting, filthy, whore,_ as he works Primo open roughly.

Primo rolls over. The fingers leave his ass stinging. He tries to push Amadeo away. He's slow and uncoordinated, inarticulate, and Amadeo slaps him. The world tilts violently on its axis; he spits at Amadeo, probably misses. Time compresses after that. Amedeo flips him again, pins his arms behind his back, fucks in too quickly and calls him a whore. He moans as Amadeo takes him too hard and fast.

~~~~~

He wakes alone with cum dried on his back.

~~~~~

In the kitchen the next morning, Amedeo is sitting with a stranger.

“So, are you the new boy toy?” the man asks. He’s slender and fay and feminine in a way that would have gotten Primo shot in Calabria.

“Who the fuck are you?” Primo snaps.

“That’s the old boy toy I was making jealous by fucking you last night,” Amedeo informs him with a charming smile, that same one he gave Primo in the bar only a week ago.

Primo had been searching through the cabinets looking for a mug, or a glass, anything to pour the coffee on the stove into, but he gives it up at the sight of Amedeo. He leaves the cabinet doors open, grabs the bottle of whiskey from the table and walks out of the apartment without another word.

He walks home with cum on his back, under his shirt, tacky and disgusting with sweat.

~~~~~

He spends the days after so angry he’s going to fly apart. He gets in an ill-advised fight with a man who looks at him wrong in a bar. He snarls at people he’s trying to make deals with. He’s got orders to make contact with some contact of Salvatore’s. He blows it by insulting the man, then insulting him again, then refusing to apologize. He doesn’t get hit for his troubles but he was almost hoping he would be.

He still has a bruise on his jaw when he gets back in town. He didn’t tell anyone he was coming, didn’t check in with Salvatore; he just arrives. He parks his car just outside of town, in the woods, and walks. Salvator will know he’s here soon enough but he goes to Leo’s anyway, knocks on the door. Regina opens for him. 

“Did you call?” she asks, because she’s still trying to teach him manners. 

“No.” For a second he thinks she’s going to turn him away, tell him to fuck off and find some other family in town to harass. 

She steps aside and he comes in without being invited.

“He’s not home yet,” Regina tells him. For a moment, his throat flames hot. He’s so angry at her he doesn’t know what to do with himself. 

He must have done something because Regina stands stock still in the kitchen, watching him carefully. He looks away from her, stalks into the living room then locks himself into the bathroom until he can breathe again. 

When he gets back to the kitchen he sits and tilts his head to her, staring her down. She must find some comfort in the gesture because she pours him a coffee.

“Primo, what do you want?” she asks eventually.

“Did I say I wanted something?” 

She closes her eyes for a moment, and he just knows she’s rolling them.

“Are you here on business? Leo and I had something planned for this weekend, I would hate to reschedule”

She would reschedule though. She does it all the time, when Salvatore needs Leo for something unexpectedly, when her brother-in-law needs Leo to help with the sheep.

He shrugs. He pulls out a cigarette and avoids looking her in the eye. His heart is racing.

Once, when he was still a teenager -- still in Calabria, still fucking around with girls -- he went out into the mountains with some kids from town. He’d laid out by a stream in the sun with his shirt off and his head thrown back and when he looked up a girl he’d never looked twice at was staring at him.

“I can see your pulse in your throat,” she had told him. She kissed the spot she’d been watching later.

He didn’t understand the appeal of kissing anyone’s throat until he’d kissed her brother two years later, and felt the boy’s pulse against his lips. 

He wonders if Regina can see his pulse racing now, in his throat.

Regina is about to say something when the door downstairs unlocks. She stands and Primo feels a cold drop in his stomach at the idea of facing Leo. He should have stayed in Rome and found Amedeo and found some messy creative way to leave him as pulp on the floor. Instead, he’s in this fucking house where everything is clean and threadbare and breakable and Primo is sure Regina will have to clean the place furiously after he leaves. 

He listens to them greet each other, listens to them as they wander towards the kitchen. Listens to Leo stop just outside the kitchen while Regina pours another cup of coffee. 

Leo sighs and steps into the kitchen, thanks his wife for the coffee with a kiss on the cheek, and turns to Primo.

He forces himself to keep looking at Leo, lets any emotion slide off his face. Regina stays silent as Leo figures out how he’s going to react to this.

“Primo,” Leo sighs out his name. Primo hates that he feels something about that tone, about his name leaving Leo’s lips on sigh. 

“Are you alright?” Leo asks. It’s the worst thing he could have asked.

He knows his jaw clenches; he knows he looks weak, dropping his gaze away from Leo, hunching shoulders in, making himself small. He’s suddenly aware his hair hasn’t been washed in days, he’s probably got coke on his shirt. His father would have slapped him, Salvatore would have done worse.

Primo shakes his head. That’s all the admission he can make. 

Leo looks at him in silence for another moment. 

“Go take a shower. Regina, do we still have the clothes he left last time?”

“I’m not sure.” Regina hurries out to check.

“Primo,” suddenly Leo is very close and he has to swallow back his urge to flinch like a fucking dog. “Are you hurt?” 

Primo takes a long drag off the cigarette and shakes his hair from his face. He’s hickies on the back of his neck. He slipped down some stairs on his way home a few days ago and his shoulder still aches. He’s got a headache. There’s bruises on his ribs from that fight. 

“No,” he croaks out. Leo looks skeptical. 

“Come on.” Primo follows him to their fucking linen closet, where Leo pulls out a towel. It’s from the wedding set, monogrammed with their initials,much too nice for Primo to use.

He showers for a long time, listening to Leo and Regina murmuring somewhere in the apartment.

He uses Regina’s shampoo, something lemony and sweet. He drips water on their bathroom tiles and does not mop it up. He does not look at himself in the mirror but he runs his fingers through his hair a few times until it lays right. He leaves the window open to let the steam out and leaves his wet towels on top of Regina and Leo’s dry ones. 

He finds Leo sitting at the kitche table, and Primo hates how fucking kingly this man looks in his own damn kitchen. How beautiful with his curls, how infuriatingly domestic with his cardigans and his well worn shirts. 

Leo stands with a huff.

“We’re going out.”

“I haven’t told Salvatore I’m here,” Primo admits.

Leo’s face twists. “Where did you park your car? I didn’t see it outside.”

“It’s parked out of town in the woods.”

Leo nods. “Smart. Salvatore isn’t here anyway. Come on; hopefully no one will feel inclined to call him.”

“Where are we going?” 

Leo cocks an eyebrow at him and Primo doesn’t know if he wants to push and take back control of this day, or not.

“You better not get me all sweaty again; I just fucking showered,” he says deciding to trust Leo.

Leo just smiles at him. 

It turns out Leo wants to take him fucking hiking. Primo would be angrier if he weren’t so fucking flabbergasted. 

“What the fuck are we doing here?” he asks when they stop by a little stream. It’s the place he gave his first blow job. There had been a wedding, he’d been drunk, the guy lived a couple valleys over; it had been a terrible blowjob. 

“We’re going up there,” Leo nods up the mountain. “If it’s really so awful to be sweaty, you can take a dip on the way back.”

They hike up to a cave. Primo knows it’s there, but he’s never been in. Primo had always focused on abandoned buildings -- homes, farms, shacks -- anywhere he could sleep for a night if he needed to run away. 

“Come, look.” Leo is crouching, lighting a lantern.

The tank is a surprise. The guns less so.

He turns to Leo, eyebrows raised, waiting for some kind of explanation.

“We took it, as part of the resistance. Don’t ask how. It’s too much to explain now. But it’s here. Most of those guns are still functional too. They’re all covered in cosmoline so they’ll need some cleaning before they’re operational.”

Why are you showing me this, Primo doesn’t ask.

“It’s not a well kept secret anymore; Giuliano got up here a few months back and went blabbing in town. And Matteo keeps his goats around here. But you should know. It’s ours -- Salvatore’s. If you need anything, he won’t notice a few guns going missing.”

Primo thinks he knows the words that fit into the gaps of what Leo is saying. 

“Was there something else? Are we just here to look at old guns?”

“Oi, fuck off. They’re perfectly good guns. A few grenades in there too.”

“You could have just told me this was here.”

“I thought you could do with some exercise. Have to make sure you’re not getting soft in the city,” Leo says with a grin that makes Primo wants to shout.

~~~~~

They stop by the stream on the way back. Primo does in fact splash the back of his neck with water. He gets his hair wet too, hoping to cool the sun hot strands. Leo watches him. Regina and Leo are well suited like that, always watching. They always knew when Primo was in trouble with his dad or Salvatore by the slump in his shoulders.

“What?” he snaps.

“Something happened? In Rome.”

“Nothing happened in Rome.” Primo looks Leo straight in the eye as he says it.

“Primo,” his voice is too soft, too gentle and Primo would really rather be hit. He should have just found Salvatore and mouthed off until the man belted him like a child.

“What? Nothing happened in Rome. I’m not hurt. It’s fine.”

“Fine. But are you in danger? Do you need help?” Leo’s tilting his head forward in that endearing way he does and Primo wants to do violence to him, if only to make him look just a little less sweet.

Primo pulled out a cigarette. He makes a production of lighting it, flicking the lighter open, taking in a deep inhale. He blows smoke out from the side of his mouth. Leo is looking at him with that impatient look Primo usually enjoys invoking but today he’s barely suppressing the shake in his hands.

“I’m trying to organize a hit on someone.”

“Jesus,” he turns from Primo, walks away a bit, turns back to him. “You want to kill someone?”

“Probably not. I haven’t decided.”

“What is it? Does he owe you money?” Leo hasn’t come back close to him yet. 

Primo shakes his head, inhales more smoke, scratches at his nose. Leo keeps looking at him, like he expects Primo to explain. Eventually, he shakes his head and brushes past Primo, in the direction of town.

“Come on we’re having dinner with Regina. You’re staying over tonight -- no you’re staying over tonight. In fact, you’re staying as many nights as you need. Then, I will come with you to Rome.” Again, Primo wants to argue, wants to yell. He nods. 

Dinner is a tense affair. Leo surely has more questions that he’s politely not asking. Regina talks about town news and doesn’t ask about their hike. Primo wants to ask them about that baby they want to have but doesn’t. Instead, they talk about the marriages that have happened in his absence. The deaths he’s not come back for. The babies. There’s the town gossip too, which is Primo’s favorite part, if only because it’s his life blood, the most dangerous tool that anyone in town could wield against him, but also a tool which he can wield back. Marisa is having an affair, again, this time with a construction worker from a seaside town. There are more affairs, rumors of someone trying to move against Salvatore, the daughter of a don from a couple valleys over ran off to Naples.

At some point, Regina reaches for him, to touch his cheek perhaps, or to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear he doesn’t know. She’s teasing. He flinches before she can make contact. 

Once, when he was very young, Primo saw his father silence a dog just by raising his hand. She had flinched back from him as if he’d actually smacked her, ears tucked down, head low to the floor, tail tucked between her legs. His father had smiled, that proud smile Primo would have done anything to see directed towards him, and petted the dog on the head. Her teeth had been bared but she didn’t bite, or even make a sound. Her eyes had been huge and terrified as he petted her roughly. 

If Primo ever flinched, his father screamed, shouted at him, hit him harder just to remind him not to be so scared next time. Primo hated that flinching dog. 

His father had broken the dog’s jaw only a few weeks later. She hadn’t been able to eat, spent all day making a terrible high crying noise until Primo went out and shot her. He held her after the life rattled out of her body. His mother found him in the dark, folded across the dog, shuddering in the cold night. She’d touched his shoulder, tried to wrap her arms around him. He’d shaken her off, turned his face so she wouldn’t see him cry. She sat in the dust, watched him dissolve into disgusting sobs, before she walked away. He’d slept with the bloody broken body in the yard that night. He buried her in the morning, before his father woke. 

In Leo and Regina’s kitchen, no one smacks him for flinching. Regina lowers her hand and mutters a quick apology. She stands to bring more wine and Leo touches her arm as she passes. She squeezes his shoulder. She pours them all more wine. Primo holds the glass in front of his mouth and doesn’t speak again until the table’s cleared.

He watches them, Leo and Regina, move through the kitchen, easy and familiar. Well worn and domestic. Primo spent his whole childhood avoiding the kitchen, always afraid of running into his father or getting a smack from his mother for being in the way. When he’d moved in with them for a few months at the age of 15 he’d been too scared to go into the kitchen on his own. He’d waited for hours until one of them got home to go into the kitchen and get an orange. 

He leaves to sit in the living room, alone, as they clean up together. He doesn’t understand them. Once, Leo had tried to explain that he loved her. Primo had asked if he loved fucking her and Leo had flushed and said yes, but it wasn’t only that. He can’t image them fucking either. He can’t imagine a coupling that’s so domestic and simple and calm. 

He tries to imagine Leo fucking him sometimes but he can’t congure a Leo who would take him the way he likes, hard and a little mean. 

A sense memory of Amedeo’s breath on the back of his neck flashes through him, the feel of his beard scraping against Primo’s ear. He can still hear the way he said _dirty, disgusting._ As if Primo wouldn’t have taken the time to clean and prepare himself, if only he’d known. 

Leo comes in a moment later with a little cup of coffee for each of them.

~~~~~

That night he hears them through the wall, from where he’s curled up on the guest bed, which will be the nursery when they get pregnant. He wonders if they’re thinking about that baby right now, as they fuck in the room next to his.

~~~~~

At breakfast, Regina hands him a little book. _Hekabe._

“Read it. It’s about revenge,” she says.

Of course, he realizes, they spoke of him last night, curled together in their bed whispering. Somehow, it’s comforting. 

Leo goes out that day, tending to the fucking sheep probably. Primo read’s _Hekabe._

He’s not sure why Regina gave it to him. He’s not a mother. He’ll never have any children. She has to know that. 

But after lunch he reads it again. Likes Polyxena, her dignity when she tells the soldiers to kill her outright. But more than that, he admires Hekabe, the way she convinces Agamemnon to bring her son’s murder to her. He likes how her violence shocks Agamemnon, a great war hero, who believed her capable of so little. 

It’s a shame though, to turn into a dog. He admires her lack of shame but she’s wasted in the body of a dog, he thinks. 

“Keep it,” Regina tells him, when he tries to give it back over dinner that night. Watching her over the table he can’t help but wonder if she’s threatening him with the book. Reminding him that she will protect her family from anyone, even him.

~~~~~

That evening he hears them in the kitchen, talking about their weekend plans. Leo wants to cancel but Regina is arguing about all the work she put in, how this is a rare opportunity for them, how Primo isn’t a fucking child, much less their child.

He leaves that night, once the two of them are asleep. Salvatore is scheduled to come back soon anyway and Primo has no desire to see his uncle. He takes _Hebake_ with him.

~~~~~

He spends weeks in Rome high, burning through any cash he had, then burning through desperate sexual encounters for more drugs. He’s on a binge. He calls Leo, who asks him “Are you high?” and he answers, “Yes,” and Leo keeps talking to him and unlike all his friends in Rome, Leo doesn’t stay on the phone with him because he’s fun when he’s high and unlike everyone in Calabria, he doesn’t hang up on Primo because he’s too manic when he’s high. Leo doesn’t ask him if he’s ok, even when Primo can hear him worrying though the phone. He doesn’t ask if Primo needs help. Primo is tempted to say he does need Leo. He’s being reckless, throwing himself at the world and trying to tear through it. He feels an earthquake under his skin; he’s trying to make any one else feel it.

He stalks Amedeo. When he’s not fucking people too high to even reciprocate, he goes to university, he goes to church, he goes to bars. Primo waits, and waits, and gets high and waits.

He calls Leo. He’s lucky that Salvatore gave Leo a phone, he’s one of the only ones in town.

“Remember that hit?” he says instead of saying hello.

“I do,” Leo answers, waiting for Primo to say it.

“I need you to come to Rome.”

“When?” Leo asks, sighing.

“Soon.”

~~~~~

The night ends with a burned body buried in a hole hours outside of Rome. By the time they’re done they’re both covered in muck. They stink of burning flesh and sweat. Primo’s shirt is soaked through but he can’t tell what’s blood and sweat in the dark. He was shaking before he stabbed Amedeo the first time and he still hasn’t stopped.

He’s collapsed on the ground, leaning against the car, trying to stop the shaking by clenching his hands. It doesn’t help but he keeps doing it just to feel the pain spark through the fresh blisters on his hand. 

Amedeo would hate how filthy his death was, how he soiled his nice shirt with his own blood, how he was buried in burnt piss stained pants. Leo wanted Primo to shoot him, had handed him a gun, had argued with Primo right until the knife made contact. That’s when Primo lost the plot a bit. 

He startles when Leo lays a hand on his shoulder, bangs his head against the car but Leo doesn’t stop touching him. He wonders if he’s shaking hard enough for Leo to feel the earthquake finally.

“Your hands,” is all he says and Primo holds them out, for Leo to pour water on them. He rubs them together, tries to the worst of the mud off his shirt.

“Get changed,” Leo says and Primo mourns, just for a moment, that he’s probably about to lose this shirt. He strips out of his shirt, finds a relatively clean corner in the car headlights -- the small of his back -- and scrubs over his hands to get rid of the worst of the grit.

He stumbles while pulling on his pants and has to catch himself on the body of the car.

“What? Only I have to strip?” he snaps when he catches Leo looking.

“I’m not covered in blood.”

“You’re covered in dirt.”

“That, Regina can wash.” Leo is still watching him; Primo hates the way it makes his skin crawl.

Leo pulls out a cigarette, lights it, takes a deep breath, then hands it to Primo. He takes a breath and is about to hand it back when Leo lights another one.

They stand there until Primo is only shaking minutely.

~~~~~

“Take me back to Rome,” Primo demands when they’re on the highway.

Leo doesn’t answer him immediately.

“Primo.” That sigh again. “Come stay with us for a few days.”

“Take me back to Rome, Leonardo,” Primo commands. Leo turns around at the next exit.

**Author's Note:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: This fic is about rape. There is a fairly graphic rape scene that starts to get intense around "Amedeo’s beard scratches against his face." If you want to skip, you can jump down to "He wakes alone." That being said, this fic also contains (non-graphic) murder and body disposal, past animal abuse and animal death (it's a dog), and past child abuse. It is safe to assume Primo is in a poor mental state for the entirety of this fic. Please take care of yourselves!
> 
> Comments and kudos are cherished! [If you want to come yell at me you can over here on tumblr.](https://howevernot.tumblr.com/)


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